kissed-by-moonlight by Rakhibul hasan (ebook reader for pc .TXT) 📕

eyes. Then, blowing me a mocking kiss, he disappeared into the woods, six of Gabriel’s wolves in hot pursuit. The agents chose that moment to scatter. If I had been in my right mind, I would have told them not to run. That running makes them chase you. But I had nothing left in me, nothing to give a group of humans that had wanted us all dead or in chains.

 

Us.

 

Humans.

 

When had I started thinking like that? When had I started thinking of myself more as a member of the Pack than as a human being?

 

Didn’t matter now.

 

Nothing mattered now but reaching him.

 

I slid to his side, my hands already reaching, searching, smearing in his blood before I’d fully registered the sight of the bullet hole. My breath was coming too fast and there were spots in front of my eyes. Leo came to my side and he was saying something that couldn’t register through the blind, animal panic that was filled my mind.

 

“I can help.”

 

The voice was sly, foreign, but at the same time strangely familiar.

 

“Help, help, help. I can help, I can.”

 

The voice was coming from within me, and in my mind’s eye I saw something, a shadow on my soul. A dripping, screaming nightmare with a smile like death and a voice like razor blades.

 

The Specter.

 

Gabriel looked up at me, and I saw a spark of recognition in his eyes.

 

“Thought-thought I killed you,” he choked, blood filling his mouth.

 

The voice in my soul cackled, clearly pleased with itself, and beside me Leo shied away.

 

“How can you help me?” I asked it, and Gabriel’s eyes closed in defeat.

 

“Don’t,” he whispered. Already knowing that it was no use.

 

The bond told me what common sense had already noted.

 

He was dying.

 

I was running out of time.

 

So I ignored him and his warning and the Specter inside of me grinned and drug its claws across my soul. The world went dark as the knowledge filled me. In my mind I saw them. Saw them riding, hunting, running. The world bowing at their feet and the sky breaking beneath the sound of their horse’s hooves. The Specter showed me the Wild Hunt of old, the Hounds as they once were.

 

Then, with just a word, it gave me the song I needed to call them to me.

 

The Call of the Hunt ripped through me, a tidal wave, a collapse of will and reason. Sanity was beaten back, chaos reigned, and in the span of a heartbeat I died a thousand small deaths.

 

I opened my mouth and howled.

 

* * * *

 

They came.

 

The Hounds of the Hunt.

 

They came from all over Briarcliff. Dragged from their beds, out of restaurants, from their jobs and friends. Leaving their cars in the streets and their spouses in their beds. They answered the Call blindly, running down sidewalks and leaping over cars. They came in twos and threes, eyes

 

wild and wild grins splitting their faces as old instincts took over. Their voices filled the night sky, joyous and strange. Leo, closer than the eleven other Alphas, was dragged to his feet by the Call and he raised his voice in harmony. The sounds melding and feeding off of one another.

 

To me, the Call was like putting my soul in my mouth and unraveling it with just the power of my voice. It shook the world on its axis and as the Alphas burst from the woods to reach Gabriel’s side, I saw them as they truly were.

 

There were three children that came hand in hand. To my eyes they appeared as some great three headed beast. The song spinning through my thoughts told me that they’d guarded the door of the Underworld before they’d been recruited for the Wild Hunt. When they shifted, their wolves magnified the energy of the others. If left to their own devices they could grow larger than most skyscrapers and consume every star in the sky.

 

Cerebus.

 

A lithe young man followed on the heels of the triplets. He was storm, a lightning strike, the tremble of the earth was woven into his skin. His howl rose pure and sweet, something steady for the childish sopranos of the three children to build off of.

 

A woman was next, her bright red hair a corona around her dark face. She was a word, an utterance, a scream in the dark. She walked in whispers, a thousand different languages rising from her like the wings of some great beast.

 

And on and on it went. I saw each of them, and the Call let me know them all.

 

They had been hiding for centuries, and as I looked among them I noticed a common thread. Each of them had a thread of Gabriel’s power woven into them. A piece of him that connected him to each and every one of them.

 

He’d been protecting them this whole time. Hiding their presence from the Mad Sidhe with a gentler, subtler, version of his gift. As he weakened, died, the threads began to fray. Their shield was falling, and, thanks to the Specter inside of me, I could feel the Mad Sidhe rejoice at the sight of the rest of their lost Hounds.

 

“No,” I thought at them, the Song making me fierce, protective where I had no desire or right to be. “They’re mine now,” I found myself telling the Sidhe. “One Rider. Many Hounds.”

 

Halfway across the world, trapped in another dimension, they screamed their denial, their rage, and blood began to drip from my ears in a steady stream.

 

Leo reached down to place a hand on my shoulder and when I looked at him he was a human torch, a supernova of explosive heat and punishing flame. I thought of the explosion from earlier and shook my head in wonder.

 

“Go,” he growled, voice drug over burning coals.

 

“But Gabriel—” I started. He pulled me to my feet.

 

“We’ll take care of him, Rider,” he told me, the title strangely formal. “But you can’t stay.”

 

I followed his gaze to see the Hounds forming a circle around us. They watched me, eyes of the brightest green, the deepest blue, the darkest black. I was reminded by all of those eyes that these were no ordinary Weres, and finally, I nodded my consent.

 

I looked down at Gabriel once more and what I saw nearly stole my breath.

 

The Call of the Hunt let me see Gabriel for what he truly was. What he would have changed into that day when Agent Liam had cut me in a bid to get a reaction. I saw him as a Hound of imaginable size. He wasn’t made of flesh and bone, but the screaming bodies of the damned. Thousands of men and women formed his arms, his legs, and his muscular torso. His teeth, made of bone, were the size of tree trunks and the earth was left dead and rotting beneath his paws. The gaze of the Hell Hound was a pit. Empty. In its depths, I found purgatory.

 

Then it whimpered, a purely animal sound, and the vision faded.

 

Whatever he was, whatever inner demon he fought to control, there was no changing who he was on the inside. Who he chose to be. Hell Hound or Werewolf, to me he was nothing more than Gabriel Evans.

 

I looked at Leo out of the corner of my eye.

 

“He lives,” I told the other man, and his lips quirked in a smile.

 

My words were an order and we both knew it.

 

He inclined his head.

 

“Of course, Rider. We’ll make sure of it.”

 

I nodded, and left the Hounds to work their magic.

 

“We know what you did there, in the dark.”

 

—Gabriel Evans

 

 

 

Chapter Twenty-two

 

 

 

I was sitting in a booth at BB’s when Sonya slid into the seat next to me.

 

“Hello, stranger,” she chirped to Asrai. The child giggled and nodded a quick greeting. I wasn’t sure whether or not Fae could get brain freezes, but, considering the speed in which Asrai was sucking down milkshakes, I was expecting her head to explode at any minute.

 

Her eyes grew heavy-lidded, and voice growing sultry to match, she looked at the man sitting next to Asrai and purred, “Hello, Gabriel.”

 

He cleared his throat, face flushing before he hid behind his menu.

 

“Hello,” he mumbled. He’d taken it seriously when I told him that Sonya started ovulating at the sight of him. In his wolfy mind he already had a mate, so the idea of causing that reaction in another woman was abhorrent to him. Even now, he couldn’t bring himself to look the reporter in the eye. Sonya thought his reactions to her made him even more adorable, and I suspected that the power of being able to make Gabriel Evans shift uncomfortably in his seat was going to her head.

 

I’d have to talk to her about it later, but for now I let it go.

 

Partially because Gabriel could take care of himself, but mostly because it was funny.

 

Two weeks had passed since the showdown with the Feds. Since then, nothing else had happened, but it was like waiting for the lightning to strike when you smelled ozone in the air.

 

You knew it was coming and waiting for it made the hair on your arms stand on end.

 

I almost preferred getting shot at by overzealous Huntsmen to waiting for the other shoe to drop. While the Feds hadn’t retaliated, we did notice that the government’s push to get the Were Bill passed was becoming even more aggressive. I had a sick suspicion that it wouldn’t be long before known Weres were detained in camps and tagged like livestock. As long as they felt safe again, the human race wouldn’t care what happened to them after that.

 

The wolves had never located Marcus after he’d run off that night. Another enemy to watch us from the shadows. The morning after the Hounds had saved Gabriel I’d gotten a call from his new secretary. I was informed that my services would no longer be needed, but that Mr. Evans

 

expected me to meet with him for lunch every day at noon, assuming my obligations to the Oracle weren’t too demanding.

 

Speaking of the Oracle, Sonya and I were swamped with interviews. It would take a while to set up things for the television special, and in the meantime we occupied ourselves with interviewing different Packs from all over the city. It had made us a lot closer and Sonya had gone from being sort of friends to maybe besties.

 

It was nice, and every now and then Sonya invited herself along to my lunches with Gabriel. Today was one of those days.

 

I sighed, eyes scanning the menu in my hands without really seeing anything.

 

In addition to everything else we had to worry about, I was starting to develop an anxiety disorder waiting for the Sidhe to make their move. Gabriel assured me that we’d be all right. Even if they knew where all their Hounds were, it would be a while before they managed to break free of the Sithin. I guess he was right. They had been trying to cross over for a few hundred years now, it wasn’t like they were suddenly going to slip free from the Fae world just because I’d sent them a metaphysical middle finger.

 

I hoped not anyway.

 

Gabriel and I had thought that if nothing else the patrols from the Specters would increase. Short of breaking out, getting one of the Hounds to enter the Sithin was the only other way to free the Mad Sidhe. We’d all had dinner last week and I’d had a chance to meet the other Hounds one on one. I knew that none of them were going to be paying any visits to the Sidhe willingly, which left kidnapping the only other option. If we stayed vigilant as far as the Specters were concerned, we shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

 

That was the theory anyway.

 

But if the fallout from the government was like a storm, the threat the Mad Sidhe represented felt a lot like drowning. Sometimes I could feel their intent through the Specter still clinging